


Handful of Doubt

by Gileonnen



Category: Destiny (Video Games)
Genre: Faith in Other People, First Time, Highly Competent People with Depression and Anxiety, M/M, Massage, Overstimulation, PWP, Sagira Is Usually Right
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-06
Updated: 2020-02-06
Packaged: 2021-02-27 21:54:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22582879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gileonnen/pseuds/Gileonnen
Summary: After a mission goes better than expected, Osiris struggles with stiff muscles and a lingering sense of dissatisfaction. When Saint-14 offers to help, though, Osiris finds that they have more in common than he'd thought.
Relationships: Osiris/Saint-14 (Destiny)
Comments: 21
Kudos: 204





	Handful of Doubt

The fire has died down to smoke and embers by the time Osiris finishes his after-action report. The dry heat makes his eyes ache until the symbols swim on his datapad, and he can find no satisfaction in a job well done.

It had been a quick firefight. No casualties among the refugees. No need for resurrections. They'd ambushed the Fallen with clean, coordinated execution, pinning down their targets against a sheer cliff and hammering them until they broke on it. Even Osiris can find no fault in the strike, although he has walked the battleground a dozen times to be sure.

Perhaps it would be easier if they had done something wrong, so that he could pin it to the page and be done with it.

By now, most of his fireteam has departed for the Last Safe City, their jumpships flanking a carrier full of refugees. Only Saint-14 remains, dozing against a towering pine tree with a brown dove nestled against his neck.

He looks peaceful, with his head bowed and his hands splayed on the thick green moss. In their long days of wandering the lands beyond the City, Osiris has seldom seen Saint-14 allow himself to rest.

Osiris rises to his feet, hissing as the tight muscles in his back knot up at the sudden movement. "You know you should stretch more," says Sagira, and at her voice, Saint-14 stirs. The dove flutters away in a clatter of wings.

Pain uncoils within Osiris--a long, dull ache that stretches from coccyx to scapulae. Where muscle latches to bone, it burns like a brand. Osiris rolls his shoulders and presses his thumbs hard against the small of his back. "If you're concerned about my well-being, why don't you open a rift," he says, trying for nonchalance and managing only pettishness.

"Nothing's wrong with you, besides not taking care of yourself," she says smugly. "When we get back to the City, you should get a massage!"

"A waste of time and glimmer."

"My backups only go back so far, Osiris. If you keep ignoring it, I'm going to have to rez you like this."

"Your inefficiency is not my concern."

"You only say that because you know I'm right."

The pain is a searing band around his ribs. He reaches back for his cowl, but even that slight movement makes the muscles along his ribs shriek in protest.

Then Saint-14's hand is on his wrist, stilling, steadying. Osiris bites back a snarl at the familiarity of that touch. "Let me help you," says Saint. His voice is still sleep-rough, a quiet rumble that resonates in Osiris's chest. "It was a hard day for all of us. Let me help with this small thing."

 _For all of us,_ Saint-14 says, as though he hadn't been slapping backs, letting children sit on his shoulders, praising Anastasia's aim until the trees shook with his praises. As though he hadn't congratulated all of them on a clean victory, laughing, his fine helm shining in the sunlight. Osiris had watched him and wondered how he could be so plainly, nakedly pleased.

He had never questioned whether that pleasure was itself a kind of armor.

"Very well," Osiris concedes at last. He cannot make his voice gentle.

"Come aboard my ship," says Saint-14. "I will make you comfortable." With a handful of Void, he smothers the last heat of their fire. Then he takes Osiris by the elbow, solicitous as a physician, and steers him toward the Grey Pigeon's gangway.

That touch sends an old prickle of irritation through him, but Osiris tamps it down. _He means no insult,_ he tells himself. _He means to be kind._ Saint-14's world is one in which each person must help each other in order to thrive; it isn't his fault that Osiris lives in another.

The inside of the Grey Pigeon is dim and cramped, especially with the two of them inside it. Only two steps separate the pilot's chair from the bunk. But the space is well-kept, the bed made, Saint-14's personal effects stowed. Only a hanging of woven ribbons at the head of the bed hints that this place is Saint-14's.

"Will you lie down?" Saint asks as he transmats his armor away. Beneath, he wears an undersuit shot through with delicate coolant channels--practical for an Exo, perhaps, but the lines flatter his broad chest and the corded muscle of his waist. Osiris finds himself wanting to trace them with his fingertips, feeling the icy pulse of coolant soothing Saint's heated chassis.

That line of thought will take him nowhere good. He strips off the heaviest parts of his armor, feathered ruff and boots, chest plate and bracers, until only the thinnest under-robe remains between him and the air. Then he slides onto the cool sheets of the bunk and pillows his cheek on his folded arms.

"Relax," says Saint, as though it's something that Osiris can do by willing it. He skims his palm over Osiris's back, neck to shoulders, ribs to hips. Even that light pressure makes Osiris's taut muscles throb--he grits his teeth against the pain, but he can't help a flinch as Saint's searching hands find the ache beneath the wing of his scapula. At once, Saint pulls away. "Tell me where you hurt."

"Everywhere," Osiris admits. "But there especially. Fifth or sixth thoracic vertebra, I believe--"

"I don't know what that means," says Saint. His fingertips map the dull edges of the pain, careful and exploratory, never pressing harder than a brisk breeze. His hands are warm and sure and incredibly gentle. "You are tight everywhere," he murmurs. "Clenched like a fist."

Osiris closes his eyes. He feels himself going slack under Saint's hands, relaxing into the mattress. "Are you surprised?"

Saint stills for a moment, palm curled over the knot of pain under Osiris's shoulder blade. "You always seem so certain," he says at last. "As though doubt cannot touch you. As though you always sleep well with your choices."

Osiris buries a bitter laugh against his wrist. "I've always thought the same of you. Your faith in the Traveler, in the Speaker--the dream of the Last Safe City--"

"And you have faith only in yourself." Slowly, Saint begins to knead his thumbs over tight muscles, smoothing them outward from the spine, bearing down with the full strength of his arms until Osiris can't help gasping at the bright, keen pain of it. "But you know yourself."

"I know myself."

Saint's knuckles graze Osiris's ribs, so gently that Osiris shivers with something deeper than pain. "Someday, I would like to know you."

Then he smooths his hands up Osiris's back in one long sweep, and Osiris forgets to answer. The ache is a red flame in the darkness behind Osiris's eyes, and Saint works it as though it were a spark of Solar Light. He drags the heels of his hands over Osiris's ribs, carves wings of hot relief over his shoulder blades; he kneads the knotted muscles at the small of Osiris's back until they loosen beneath his hands. At some point, he shifts to kneel over Osiris's thighs, and the solid weight of him only sends a thrill of unchaste pleasure licking along every kindled nerve.

No one has ever touched him like this--with his whole being seemingly focused on Osiris's body, driving the pain out as though smelting impurities from gold. No one has ever charted the places where pleasure waits beneath pain, its roots deeper and infinitely stronger. His dulled nerves quicken until even the lightest brush of Saint's hand makes him gasp and shudder, and he wants to weep from the extravagance of it.

Time seems to spool out forever. The sheets warm beneath his skin; his muscles grow lax, lambent with ease. His cock throbs against his loins with an urgent heat, but the last thing he craves is a requital.

At long last, Saint's hands still. His palms splay over Osiris's back. "Don't stop," Osiris whispers, and he barely recognizes that rough, needy voice as his own.

"I should not," says Saint softly. He begins to climb to his knees, and the cool air fills the space between them.

Osiris shifts onto his back, taking Saint's hand. It trembles in his. In that caught moment, he looks up into Saint's shining eyes, and the want mirrored there holds him transfixed.

Every movement feels slow, deliberate; every muscle is attenuated and slack with pleasure. Osiris sways up for a searching kiss, and Saint gathers him into his arms and bends down to welcome his lips.

There is too much of him for Osiris to hold. He laces his hands together at the back of Saint's neck and clings to him as though to a spar in a heaving sea.

The vents near Saint's mouth are warm as breath, and Osiris inhales the unfamiliar scent of him--the tang of heated circuits, the faint richness of machine lubricant. He knows that he will never taste those scents again without remembering this kiss, and Saint's hard body flush against his own. "May I touch you?" asks Saint against his lips.

The vibration of his voice sends a charge like lightning through Osiris. He presses his brow to Saint's and answers, "Touch me however you like."

He does not expect Saint to cup his face in one huge, gentle hand, or to brush the side of his thumb over Osiris's cheekbone as though he has never seen anything so lovely or so delicate. The tenderness in that touch somehow cuts deeper than those unyielding hands on his back, deeper even than the kiss. When Saint presses his knuckles to Osiris's lips, his face rapt with reverence and trust, a great levee bursts within Osiris's heart.

He wants so badly to be worthy of that faith.

He kisses Saint's knuckles, his palm, the bend of his wrist--the suprasternal notch at the juncture of his clavicle struts, and the hard-edged angle of his jaw. He skims his hands down Saint's sides, over the perfect curve of his backside, and feels the compact musculature there tense and then yield beneath his touch. Saint ducks his head against Osiris's neck, smothering an urgent sound as he rocks up and into the embrace. Osiris thinks could lose himself for years in this slow exploration, mapping Saint's sensors in a cartography of shudders and moans.

"Please," says Saint at last, his mouth pressed hard against Osiris's jaw. "Please touch me."

Osiris's pulse is loud in his ears. He folds one of Saint's hands around his own and says, "Show me how."

Saint turns Osiris's hand in his and guides it to his cock, swollen and straining against the fabric of his undersuit. The intimacy of it makes Osiris's breath catch--the weight of Saint in his hand, the way the curve fits perfectly to his palm, the full-throated groan that Saint makes when Osiris grinds down against him. For a moment, he imagines having Saint inside him, thrusting deep into in his straining throat, and that thought alone nearly brings him over the edge.

The last of their clothing dissolves into data, and Saint leans in for another searing kiss. Osiris opens to it and drinks in the heat of him, the silicon scent of him, the hard glorious set of his lips. Saint bucks up into his hand, and Osiris quickens his pace in answer. When Saint reaches out for him and takes him in hand, Osiris lets out a cry that he barely recognizes as his own.

It's too much--the kiss, the hand on his cock, the lingering ghosts of a thousand tender touches. Warm, diffuse pleasure rolls through Osiris in a resistless wave, and he thrusts into Saint's hand until he shudders apart.

In the aftershocks of their pleasure, Saint rests his chin on Osiris's shoulder, one arm still loosely slung around him. Beneath the harsh sound of his own breath, Osiris hears the faint whirr of fans under Saint's chassis.

He presses a kiss to Saint's cheek. "Satisfied?" he asks.

Saint just wraps both arms around Osiris's waist and squeezes him tightly. "Immensely. And you?"

It's in Osiris to say _No._ To dismiss the joy of what they've done, and to look only for what could be improved.

But he can find no flaw in Saint-14, and he cannot make himself search for one. "Yes," he answers. "I'm entirely satisfied."


End file.
